Here’s What Democrats Got Out of the Cromnibus

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The worst part of the “cromnibus” spending bill was the provision that guts a small piece of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill and allows banks to get back into the custom swaps business. So why did Democratic negotiators agree to this? In a long tick-tock published yesterday, Politico tells us:

During [] negotiations with House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), his Senate counterpart, agreed to keep the provision in exchange for more funding for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to aides.

OK. Democrats have been ambivalent about this particular provision of Dodd-Frank from the start, and therefore they were willing to cut a deal that allowed Republicans to repeal it. But what about the rest of the spending bill? Republicans got a bunch of venal little favors inserted, but what did Democrats get? Here’s retiring Rep. Jim Moran:

In 20 years of being on the appropriations bill, I haven’t seen a better compromise in terms of Democratic priorities. Implementing the Affordable Care Act, there’s a lot more money for early-childhood development — the only priority that got cut was the EPA but we gave them more money than the administration asked for….There were 26 riders that were extreme and would have devastated the Environmental Protection Agency in terms of the Clean Water and Clean Air Act administration; all of those were dropped. There were only two that were kept and they wouldn’t have been implemented this fiscal year. So, we got virtually everything that the Democrats tried to get.

The Administration appreciates the bipartisan effort to include full-year appropriations legislation for most Government functions that allows for planning and provides certainty, while making progress toward appropriately investing in economic growth and opportunity, and adequately funding national security requirements. The Administration also appreciates the authorities and funding provided to enhance the U.S. Government’s response to the Ebola epidemic, and to implement the Administration’s strategy to counter the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, as well as investments for the President’s early education agenda, Pell Grants, the bipartisan Manufacturing Institutes initiative, and extension of the Trade Adjustment Assistance program.

What’s the point of posting this laundry list? Curiosity. Last night a reader sent a tweet to me: “Honest question: what do progressives get out of this? ‘Govt not shutting down’ not enough.” I was stumped. I really had no idea whether Democrats had gotten anything in this bill, or if they were just caving in to a whole bunch of obnoxious Republican demands merely in exchange for keeping the government funded.

But as it turns out, Democrats did get a bunch of stuff they wanted. And of course, that’s in addition to getting the government funded before Republicans take over Congress in January, which is worthwhile all by itself. We can each decide for ourselves whether Democrats got enough, or if they should have held out for a better deal, but they weren’t left empty-handed.

So what I’m curious about is this: why are virtually no Democrats talking about this? As near as I can tell, there was literally no attempt to sell this compromise to the base, or to anyone else. As a result, the general feeling among progressives is simple: this bill was an unqualified cave-in from gutless Democrats who, once again, refused to fight back against Republican hostage taking. And as usual, Republicans won.

I understand that trying to defend a messy, backroom bill that trades some dull but responsible victories for a bunch of horrible little giveaways isn’t very appealing to anyone. And who knows? Maybe Democrats were afraid that if they crowed too much about the concessions they’d won it would just provoke the tea party wing of the Republican party and scuttle the bill. The tea partiers were already plenty pissed off about the cromnibus, after all.

Still, shouldn’t someone have been in charge of quietly making the progressive case for this bill? It wouldn’t have convinced everyone, but it might have reduced the grumbling within the base a little bit. Why was that not worth doing?

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